Blogs

Working with partners across CGIAR and externally to catalyze change, CGIAR Excellence in Breeding has also adapted its approaches. And it has been adding and reallocating some key talent.

High-impact Rice Breeding in East and West Africa (Hi-Rice) tackles one of the sources of low rice productivity: a lack of high performing, locally adapted varieties.

Plant breeders produce new varieties for their customers: farmers. To predict what kinds of new varieties are likely to offer significant benefits to farmers, breeders may turn to their customers to evaluate which characteristics might make a new variety more acceptable.

New series of manuals developed by EiB is a practical guide to designing crossing, evaluation and selection strategies, and developing performance indicators such as genetic gain and heritability.

In February, the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding (EiB) Platform assessed breeding operations and phenotyping capacity at five CGIAR and national crop research stations in West Africa.

Market and crop development specialists in Africa are making important steps towards embedding customer- and product-driven breeding practices in the region in 2020.

One the chief obstacles to agricultural development in Africa is the low rate at which farmers adopt improved varieties with the potential to improve livelihoods, resilience, food security and better nutrition.

A pilot study to validate tools that will help breeders to pay more attention to gender is about to be launched with two breeding programs in Nigeria and Kenya.

On January 15, the CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform (EiB) held a one-day workshop with users of its genotyping and data analytics services at the 2020 International Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) conference, held in San Diego, USA. 

Members of the Enterprise Breeding System (EBS) advisory committee are lending expertise to make progress on the development of a full-spectrum breeding data management software.